Upon my honour I could not have enlightened him. Besides he did not
ask me, and he went on talking to himself.

"This is what is called a cryptogram, or cipher," he said, "in which
letters are purposely thrown in confusion, which if properly arranged
would reveal their sense. Only think that under this jargon there may
lie concealed the clue to some great discovery!"

As for me, I was of opinion that there was nothing at all, in it;
though, of course, I took care not to say so.

Then the Professor took the book and the parchment, and diligently
compared them together.

"These two writings are not by the same hand," he said; "the cipher
is of later date than the book, an undoubted proof of which I see in
a moment. The first letter is a double m, a letter which is not to be
found in Turlleson's book, and which was only added to the alphabet
in the fourteenth century. Therefore there are two hundred years
between the manuscript and the document."

I admitted that this was a strictly logical conclusion.

"I am therefore led to imagine," continued my uncle, "that some
possessor of this book wrote these mysterious letters. But who was
that possessor? Is his name nowhere to be found in the manuscript?"

My uncle raised his spectacles, took up a strong lens, and carefully
examined the blank pages of the book. On the front of the second, the
title-page, he noticed a sort of stain which looked like an ink blot.
But in looking at it very closely he thought he could distinguish
some half-effaced letters. My uncle at once fastened upon this as the
centre of interest, and he laboured at that blot, until by the help
of his microscope he ended by making out the following Runic
characters which he read without difficulty.

"Arne Saknussemm!" he cried in triumph. "Why that is the name of
another Icelander, a savant of the sixteenth century, a celebrated
alchemist!"

I gazed at my uncle with satisfactory admiration.

"Those alchemists," he resumed, "Avicenna, Bacon, Lully, Paracelsus,
were the real and only savants of their time. They made discoveries
at which we are astonished. Has not this Saknussemm concealed under
his cryptogram some surprising invention? It is so; it must be so!"

The Professor's imagination took fire at this hypothesis.

"No doubt," I ventured to reply, "but what interest would he have in
thus hiding so marvellous a discovery?"

"Why? Why? How can I tell? Did not Galileo do the same by Saturn? We
shall see. I will get at the secret of this document, and I will
neither sleep nor eat until I have found it out."

My comment on this was a half-suppressed "Oh!"

"Nor you either, Axel," he added.

"The deuce!" said I to myself; "then it is lucky I have eaten two
dinners to-day!"

"First of all we must find out the key to this cipher; that cannot be
difficult."

At these words I quickly raised my head; but my uncle went on
soliloquising.

"There's nothing easier. In this document there are a hundred and
thirty-two letters, viz., seventy-seven consonants and fifty-five
vowels. This is the proportion found in southern languages, whilst
northern tongues are much richer in consonants; therefore this is in
a southern language."

These were very fair conclusions, I thought.

"But what language is it?"

Here I looked for a display of learning, but I met instead with
profound analysis.

"This Saknussemm," he went on, "was a very well-informed man; now
since he was not writing in his own mother tongue, he would naturally
select that which was currently adopted by the choice spirits of the
sixteenth century; I mean Latin. If I am mistaken, I can but try
Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, or Hebrew. But the savants of the
sixteenth century generally wrote in Latin. I am therefore entitled
to pronounce this, à priori, to be Latin. It is Latin."

I jumped up in my chair. My Latin memories rose in revolt against the
notion that these barbarous words could belong to the sweet language
of Virgil.

"Yes, it is Latin," my uncle went on; "but it is Latin confused and
in disorder; "_pertubata seu inordinata,_" as Euclid has it."

"Very well," thought I, "if you can bring order out of that
confusion, my dear uncle, you are a clever man."

"Let us examine carefully," said he again, taking up the leaf upon
which I had written.